Getting your Trinity Audio player ready...

There’s a lot of bad news to take in today – Israeli strikes in Lebanon leave more than 500 dead; the southeast US is preparing for a major hurricane, which could impact East Tennessee with heavy rain and strong winds later this week; K-Mart closes its last store, and the list goes on.

On the lighter side, Tuesday, September 24, was National Punctuation Day…if you’re a student, you are going to be graded on your punctuation, and if you’re a newspaper writer, there’s always the fear of not getting it right when it comes to punctuation

What is punctuation? It’s the apostrophe, the semicolon, the exclamation point, and don’t forget the lowly period, which is usually at the end of every sentence, unless you ask a question, then it is a question mark, and occasionally you need an exclamation point.

Yep, punctuation has got its own holiday. The holiday started when Jeff Rubin, a former reporter, grew increasingly frustrated as he spotted errors in the newspaper.

“I would sit at the kitchen table with my red Sharpie … screaming obscenities, which would upset my wife,” Rubin said in explaining his idea for the day.. “She encouraged me to find another outlet for my aggravation.”

In 2004, he secured a listing for the day in the “Chase’s Calendar of Events” reference book, and National Punctuation Day was born.

“The first two years it was on August 22, because that’s my birthday,” Rubin said. “I figured if you’re going to start a holiday, you should have it on a day you can remember.”

But he moved the festivities to September 24 in 2006, placing it squarely in the school year and honoring the number of his favorite baseball hero, Willie Mays.

The day isn’t just for people who get cranky over misplaced commas or hyperventilate over errant hyphens.

Rubin said he wanted to help educators remind students that punctuation still matters, even in an age of rapid-fire tweets and text messages.

“We are graduating children from high schools now who cannot read and cannot write,” he says. “When these kids get out into the real world, they’re going to be unemployable.”

Punctuation really makes a difference. Would we really miss the distinction between “it’s” and “its? Any ambiguity arising from its absence would be more than made up for by not having to worry about it. Technically, the apostrophe is not a punctuation mark anyway, they say: it doesn’t tell you to pause or inflect. It is more like a letter of the alphabet, an extremely elusive one.

Then take the hyphen, another mark governed by a list of rules disproportionate to its tiny size.

The hyphen dates back to the Greeks, although Gutenberg is erroneously thought to have invented it, in order to justify the lines of his Bible. This slippery character cuts both ways: it can connect words or divide them. 

Why is punctuation so important? Simply put, it can completely change the meaning of a sentence and it’s said that it can save lives. How can it save lives? Consider the sentence “Let’s eat, Grandma!” Leaving out the comma – “Let’s eat Grandma!” – completely changes the meaning of that sentence, and proves that, indeed, punctuation saves lives.

While many people may not have consciously considered punctuation since their elementary school days, it is a foundation of the writing industry. Reporters sometimes (often) (frequently) obsess over comma placement, whether something should be quoted or hyphenated, or whether this is one of those opportunities where a semicolon is appropriate. And then it hits us: Does anyone care as much as we do about this stuff? Probably very few people do, but that doesn’t mean we should abandon ship and give up on proper punctuation. It does matter!

Here are a few more examples where incorrect or missing punctuation saves lives:

– “I like cooking my family and my pets.” 

– “We’re going to learn to cut and paste kids.” 

There is no fear of losing lives over incorrect punctuation. Be sure you know all 14 punctuation marks. Finally, remember not only to spell check but also to proofread so that you don’t send out a transcript containing an error that is “to embarrassing.”

Incorrect punctuation? It’s just as common as incorrect pronunciation.